The IPO Window

What this pack runs.

A private mark is the last price someone paid for a slice of the company, applied to the whole. A listing is the first price at which anyone can sell any amount, and it arrives with a bill that runs for as long as the company stays listed. WeWork filed at a $47bn mark and met $10bn; Instacart's 2021 peak met $9.9bn; Airbnb's $18bn emergency round met $86.5bn on its first day. In each case the public price was the price of the business, and the mark was not. A room prices the listing at the mark, argues about the fee and what being public costs a year, and compares the result to nothing. That is not the comparison. The money the owners need can usually be raised the other way, from a private buyer at a discount the buyer names, and in most companies no one has asked what that discount is. This pack turns it into two unit costs and an annuity. A dollar raised publicly costs shares at the public price you can defend, after fees, plus every year of being public, discounted. A dollar raised privately costs shares at the private buyer's discount. The point where the two routes hand away the same for the money needed is the break-even markdown, how far below the mark the public price can fall before staying private is cheaper, and the distance from it to where the listed peers trade is what a board can watch each quarter. It stops on six conditions: no mark, no figure for the new money the business needs, no figure for the cash the holders need out, no public price read from the peers, no cost of being public on its own, and no private buyer asked.

The casebooks these cases come from.

The pack reads nine sourced decisions through the framework. They are drawn from these casebooks, each one a set of verified records on a single decision type.

A verified record has passed a mechanical claim-versus-source check, a second model's read, and human approval. The count is what exists today, not a target.